Selfish: who decides whose needs come first?

Two questions in one sentence

A familiar scene. Someone says they won’t come to the family lunch on Sunday because they need a weekend alone. There’s a pause, and then: “That’s a bit selfish, no?” Nobody in the room checks whether the need is real.

About two thousand years ago, the rabbi Hillel put the whole problem in one sentence: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?” (Pirkei Avot 1:14, Joshua Kulp’s translation).

What is very interesting is that he doesn’t choose. The first question defends the self and the second warns against it, and he leaves both standing. We usually pick one. Look after yourself, because nobody else will, or don’t think only of yourself. Each camp sees the other as the danger.

Selfish lives between the two questions, and it’s a strange word. Everyone can name a selfish person, a colleague or an ex. Almost nobody says it about themselves, or only with a “but”. We say it to others, at fairly precise moments: when they say no, or keep an evening for themselves. The word decides whose needs have to give way more than it describes someone.

My argument has two parts. The easy one is that taking care of your own needs is not selfish. The harder one is in the title, because someone has to decide which needs count. I think a need becomes legitimate when we can name it, put it next to the needs of others and discuss it openly, whatever the strength of the feeling behind it.

Where the word falls

If selfish is a verdict, the first thing to look at is who receives it.

In the 1970s, the Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan interviewed twenty-nine women who were deciding whether to end a pregnancy. Many of them saw any thought for themselves as selfish; being good meant giving way. Some changed their view during the decision, until, in Gilligan’s words, “the disparity between selfishness and responsibility dissolves” (In a Different Voice, 1982, p. 94). One of them, Sharon, found a simple rule: “responsibility and caring about yourself and others”. Then, more directly: “it doesn’t always have to be you who gets hurt” (p. 99).

Gilligan’s bigger idea, that women and men think about morality in different voices, did not survive well. In 1984 Lawrence Walker reviewed the studies and found “nonsignificant sex differences in moral reasoning” (Child Development). What remains is smaller: people who are expected to give way learn to hear their own needs as a fault, and that has to do with where they stand.

The political theorist Joan Tronto built a whole book on that position. In any society, she writes, “the caring needs of some are met more completely than the caring needs of others” (Moral Boundaries, 1993, p. 146). The powerful define their needs as the important ones and give the work to someone else. She calls it “privileged irresponsibility”, a polite name for a very old habit.

Arlie Hochschild measured one version of it. In the American dual-earner families she studied in the 1980s, once housework and childcare were counted, women worked about fifteen hours a week more than men, a “leisure gap” next to the wage gap (The Second Shift, 1989, pp. 3-4).

The one who always gives way also pays a price. Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz call it “unmitigated communion”, “a focus on and involvement with others to the exclusion of the self”, and they found it linked to psychological distress, while caring for others and for yourself at the same time was not (1998).

The study shows a correlation and can’t say which causes which. Adam Grant builds on this work in Give and Take (2013): his “selfless” givers burn out, and his “otherish” givers, who keep their own interests in view, last (interview).

The word pushes the work toward the people who find it hardest to refuse, and then makes them feel guilty for wanting to.

Self-love was never the problem

The idea that loving yourself is the beginning of all trouble is very old, and so is the answer to it.

Rousseau separated two kinds of self-love in the 1750s. Amour de soi is the simple wish to live and be well, natural and harmless. Amour-propre is the self-love that compares, that needs to be seen as worth more and to pass first. For him, most of what goes wrong in society comes from the second one, especially in note XV of the Discourse on Inequality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Seen this way, what we call selfishness is the need to rank.

Erich Fromm went further. In Man for Himself (1947) he wrote that loving yourself and loving others don’t compete: “Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.” On the same page: “The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself” (p. 131).

He came back to it in The Art of Loving in 1956. Fromm was a psychoanalyst reading people, and he ran no experiment. Still, we all know someone who takes more than their share and doesn’t look any happier for it.

Buddhist meditation arrives at the same place by another road. In the Visuddhimagga, the fifth-century manual attributed to Buddhaghosa, loving-kindness begins with yourself: “First of all it should be developed only towards oneself” (IX.8, trans. Ñāṇamoli, Wisdomlib).

The reason is practical: your own wish to be happy is the model for wishing it to others. This proves nothing about psychology, of course. But a tradition whose whole work is to loosen the ego never saw care for oneself as the enemy.

Psychology has its own words for what this care protects. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s self-determination theory names three basic needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness, and when they are frustrated, well-being drops (American Psychologist, 2000). The third one is being connected to others, so taking care of your needs already includes needing other people.

This is also where I leave Ayn Rand. She defended self-interest too, but she kept the word and changed its meaning: “the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests” (The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964, introduction). Rand says the accusation is unfair. I’d rather keep it and make it smaller: selfishness is the claim to come first, and only that.

And the guilt so many people feel when they rest or say no? Maybe part of it is a place in a line we learned very early. The feeling is real, but what it tells us is less sure.

Who says it’s a need?

So far the argument goes down easily, which is usually a bad sign. The serious objection doesn’t say we have no needs. It asks who decides that a desire is a need, and in practice the answer is the one who has the desire.

Christopher Lasch saw it coming. In The Culture of Narcissism (1979) he describes a “therapeutic sensibility” where “therapists define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements” (p. 13). Sacrifice, loyalty and duty suddenly look like obstacles to well-being. Eva Illouz, presenting the communitarian critique before discussing it, is even more direct: therapeutic culture “encourages us to put our needs and preferences above our commitments to others” (Saving the Modern Soul, 2008, p. 2).

Once needs and preferences share a name, “I need” closes a conversation that “I’d prefer” would have opened.

I have to admit that everything I wrote above could serve exactly this culture. A whole industry now sells rest and “me time” as needs. Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz describe the citizen it wants: “individualistic, resilient, self-motivated, optimistic, and highly emotionally intelligent” (Manufacturing Happy Citizens, 2019, p. 3). A defence of self-care that stops at “I feel I need it” is a gift to that market.

Then there is scale. In 1972 Peter Singer argued that if we can prevent something bad without giving up anything of comparable moral importance, we should do it (“Famine, Affluence, and Morality”). Next to people without food or medicine, many “needs” discussed in comfortable homes are comforts. This essay is written from that kind of home, and mostly for people choosing between two good things rather than between surviving and not.

And there is culture. Many traditions, Confucian ethics or the Indian idea of dharma for example, see the self as a knot of obligations more than a unit with needs to defend. Joseph Henrich argues that the individualism inside the very phrase “my needs” is recent and, at the scale of the world, rather strange (The WEIRDest People in the World, 2020). Hindi keeps a small trace of this. The everyday word for selfishness, svārtha, comes from a Sanskrit compound meaning “one’s own affair or advantage” (Monier-Williams). The etymology proves nothing, but many languages put the claims of the self on the side of the problem.

None of this kills the case for self-care. It does ask for a test that goes beyond the strength of a feeling. Len Doyal, a medical ethicist, and Ian Gough, who works on social policy, give one in A Theory of Human Need (1991). Basic needs, health and autonomy, are defined by what happens when they are missing: “serious harm”, where a person can no longer really take part in their own life (Gough).

If you miss a preference you’re disappointed; if you miss a need you can’t fully take part. The line is often blurry, but at least you can argue about it with someone, which you can’t do with a feeling.

Less a right than a way of deciding

Back to the Sunday lunch. “Am I being selfish?” is hard to answer alone by looking inside, because both feelings involved are bad witnesses. Guilt may only tell you your place in someone else’s order, and the feeling of need may be a preference wearing a bigger word.

What we can judge is how a need is handled. First, is it real in Doyal and Gough’s sense: would going without it stop you from taking part in your own life, or just disappoint you? Then, has it been said out loud, instead of being taken or given up in silence? And has it been weighed against the needs of the people it touches, with them present and free to answer?

That makes legitimacy closer to a way of deciding than to a right. To “who decides?” it answers neither “me” nor “them” but everyone concerned, openly, which is less comfortable.

It also shows why selfish misses its target so often. Say it to a carer who asks for a day off, and you confuse a need with a demand for priority. Hold it back from someone who uses “my needs” to close every discussion, and you miss the moment a need became a rank.

This view also doesn’t assume that caring for yourself and caring for others are always opposed. Sharon’s “responsibility and caring about yourself and others” describes a negotiation. Research on giving goes in the same direction, though less neatly than the self-help books say. A large registered replication of the idea that spending money on others makes us happier than spending it on ourselves gave mixed results across three experiments: one clear effect, one null and one small effect (Aknin et al., 2020). A 2024 review of preregistered studies still found the effect modest but reliable (Folk & Dunn, Annual Review of Psychology). The two kinds of care overlap more than the word selfish suggests, and when they clash, the clash is real but not permanent.

I don’t want to sell this too well. A way of deciding supposes that everyone has a voice, and Tronto’s whole point is that those whose needs are met the least are often the least able to name them or be heard. Agreements between unequal people tend to repeat the inequality. For them, saying a need out loud is a beginning and not much more; the rest is money and law, and no conversation provides those.

Which brings us back to Hillel’s third question. “If not now, when?” is usually quoted as a call to act. After the first two, it can also mean: stop postponing the conversation about whose needs come first, and have it while there is still something to share.

Sources

• Aknin, L. B., Dunn, E. W., Proulx, J., Lok, I., & Norton, M. I. (2020). Does spending money on others promote happiness? A registered replication report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Link
• Buddhaghosa. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), IX.8 (Ñāṇamoli, Trans.). Link
• Cabanas, E., & Illouz, E. (2019). Manufacturing happy citizens. Polity. (French ed.: Happycratie, Premier Parallèle, 2018.)
• Doyal, L., & Gough, I. (1991). A theory of human need. Macmillan.
• Folk, D., & Dunn, E. (2024). How can people become happier? A systematic review of preregistered experiments. Annual Review of Psychology. Link
• Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. Rinehart.
• Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Harvard University Press.
• Grant, A. (2013). Give and take. Viking.
• Helgeson, V. S., & Fritz, H. L. (1998). A theory of unmitigated communion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 173-183. Link
• Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Hochschild, A., with Machung, A. (1989). The second shift. Viking.
• Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul. University of California Press.
• Kulp, J. (Trans.). Mishnah Yomit, Pirkei Avot 1:14. Sefaria. Link
• Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism. W. W. Norton.
• Rand, A. (1964). The virtue of selfishness. New American Library.
• Rousseau, J.-J. (1755). Discourse on the origin of inequality, note XV.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
• Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229-243. Link
• Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries. Routledge.
• Walker, L. J. (1984). Sex differences in the development of moral reasoning: A critical review. Child Development, 55(3), 677-691. Link

Note: this essay was written with the help of AI. The thesis, choices and final validation are the author’s.